Name of Bergen County soldier killed in Vietnam added to N.J. memorial

HOLMDEL – Forty-four years after Robert H. Wescott Jr. was killed in combat in Vietnam, an engraver on Tuesday sandblasted his name into one of the black granite panels at the state’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial.

With that, he joined 1,562 of his comrades who died in combat in Vietnam whose names have been etched into the stone. Twenty of the names were added after the wall was dedicated in 1995, the last two additions five years ago in 2008.

Nick Carollo of Stonecraft Lettering Company in North Arlington adding the name of Robert H. Wescott Jr. of Teaneck to the wall Tuesday.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Lynn Duane, the administrator of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Foundation on a bright, sunny morning after engraver Nick Carollo had removed a rubber stencil from the granite to reveal the newest inclusion.

“The way everybody looks at it is that he is where he belongs,” she said. “He is among everybody else who made the ultimate sacrifice.”

Despite his New Jersey credentials, Wescott, who died at 34 years old in Tay Ninh in 1969, was not included in the memorial because his home of record was given as Philadelphia where one brother lived at the time of his death, Duane said.

Efforts to address the oversight got under way about a year ago when Wescott’s daughter contacted the foundation to alert them to his New Jersey roots and other discrepancies in his public biographies. In fact, the tombstone above his grave in Beverly National Cemetery reads “New Jersey.”

The daughter provided the foundation’s staff with her father’s military records, birth certificate and other evidence documenting his New Jersey connections, Duane said.

Wescott’s family has deep ties in Englewood, and he grew up in neighboring Teaneck. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1953 in Newark while he was student at Lodi High School and using a Main Street, Little Ferry address to do so.

Wescott served during the Korean War and two tours of duty in Vietnam, from 1963 to 1964 and 1968 to 1969, according to the foundation. In between, he was stationed in Germany and New York.

The pavilion-like memorial is ringed by 366 black granite panels, each representing a day of the year, including one for February 29.

Wescott’s name was etched in a column reserved for those killed on April 29. It appeared sixth from the top and below that of Harold Henasey, 21 years old when he died in 1968 in Quang Tin.

The daughter, born Christine Wescott, was seven years old when her father died and did not know that he had been killed in combat.

“It was like once he died, his story ended, and I wanted to make this wrong right,” she said Tuesday.

As Carollo used a machine to blast the sand into the granite, she stood behind him, holding a bouquet of red roses in her hand, her eyes shielded under dark glasses, her red fingernails pressed to her trembling lips. In her arms she carried a chocolate-colored teddy bear, dressed in army fatigues and the logo of Wescott’s last unit — the 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, or Jumping Mustangs as they were known.

Later, she touched the monument and then placed the bouquet at its base — each of the red rose for a member of her father’s battalion, she said.

“I am so proud to be your daughter,” read the card accompanying the bouquet. It was signed, “Love, Chris.”

Carollo, the proprietor of Stonecraft Lettering Company in North Arlington, and Greg Boyajian, owner of American Monument Company in Englewood, said they were contributing to the legacies of those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Carollo said he tries not to get emotional, but is not always successful.

“It was such a sad thing,” he said, “because they were really young boys.”

“I think it’s the only way that you can really honor somebody,” Carollo said. “They say — this is what I read one time — a monument is built for people that didn’t experience what happened. In other words, they put this monument up, so that my grandson would be able to come here and see what took place during those years. If this wasn’t here, he would never be able to experience that. That’s why a monument is really built.”